After three days of nightly skulking and hiding in small caves by day, I was about ready to try something stupid. It grated at me, in ways I couldn’t quite explain, to have the open skies denied to me. I yearned to walk beneath the stars without having to conceal myself, to let the wind play with my hair as it streamed through my fingers, maybe to climb the nearby peaks and enjoy the nigh eternal glaciers, yet, all that was impossible as long as the cursed Manticores were out there, hunting for us.

And hunting us, they did. We had been hearing their roars for the last two days and seen their massive, flying forms during the occasional glance we had taken out of our hiding places. And as much as I wanted to strike them from the skies, to trample them into the dirt and shred their bodies, trying to do so would only lead to the demise of us all. No, if we wanted to hunt them, we would have to be careful and cunning, or we would be the prey, not the predator.

For that, Lenore and I had been looking for something else during our daily scrying for hide-outs further down our path. If we managed to find a larger cave-complex, with multiple exits or something along those lines, we would have a point to retreat to, where the Manticores couldn’t come after us, without losing their major advantages, namely their numbers and ability to fly, the combination of which would allow them to swarm and tear us to pieces. In close quarters, especially in narrow crags and tunnels similar to the ones I had visited back with the Ashenforge-dwarves, I had quite a bit of confidence in our ability to slaughter almost any number of Manticores. Their own bodies, the source of their greatest strength, would also be their greatest weakness.

Sadly, so far, we had failed to find any such complex, or even anything that had the potential to be suitable. No, the only things we had found were narrow crags and holes, forcing us to scrabble in the dirt like animals. A state I didn’t like one bit.

Almost as if to make up for my annoyance, there was one major upside during those last couple of days. Mortal Hurbis, possibly to make up for the need to constantly keep magical concealment active and it having the very real potential to see me dead, was a game-changer in many ways. Whenever I tried something new with my magic, or experimented with it in ways I hadn’t quite figured out yet, the stat-bonus activated and gave me a major boost. The best thing about it was, even minor alterations counted, such as trying out slightly different connecting patterns or changes to the way I drew my runes.

The flip-side was that once I had figured out a new way to work my magic, like the alteration to the scrying-spell that allowed Lenore and me to use independent constructs I had figured out on the first day, the boost would go away unless I kept altering the spell-work. Which was an interesting challenge, as I had a desire to use that boost as much as possible, simply because it was that good. At first, I had considered it a true detriment, something I should probably avoid during the live-version but now, after using and abusing it for a few days, I wasn’t quite as certain of that. I would have to see how it played with people other than Olivia and how difficult it would be to keep the effect concealed in a town.

Or I might truly go a path of hermitage in the live-game, intentionally isolating myself instead of it being a feature of the constant travel, shared only with a few, mostly, trusted companions. The idea to build myself a tower, similar to the one I had created in my capsule-space and immerse myself in the magic of Mundus had a certain draw, even if I would have to figure something out for my streaming or somewhat change outside of Road to Purgatory, in a way that would allow me to balance a job with magical research, as silly as that sounded. Options and considerations, but for later. For now, there were Manticores to murder, an ocean to cross and finally, a Soul Prison to shatter.

A smile appeared on my face when I realised that studying the soul-prison, now with greatly increased attributes, might yield some interesting results. I doubted there was a way to open it without a major source of Power, but it was worth taking a look. At least if I could ascertain that neither Olivia nor anyone but Sigmir got a glimpse of it. I trusted them, but only to a point.

Those thoughts kept part of my mind entertained, while another part controlled the magical construct I used to move through the shadows of the late afternoon. Slowly but surely, I had become more proficient with the particularities of the Shadows during the time of twilight, when the light was changing and thus the shadows around me, too. The effects made me curious, wondering if there was a way to incorporate the ever-changing nature of the twilight into my magic, to allow for effects I had yet to consider or understand. It was a part of the Darkness I had yet to truly explore and given that one of the essential parts of Darkness was Change, I had a feeling I should do so, at some point.

But for now, I had other priorities, namely to find a good hiding spot, hopefully somewhere in the right direction, after we had been forced into a bit of a de-tour the last two days. The ancient, imperial road was a wonderful construct, but with our need to hide during the day, we had been forced to abandon it, simply due to a lack of suitable locations near it. I had some idea about its location, thanks to the ebb and flow of the Astral River that it was somewhat linked to, but it would take some time to get back to it.

Abandoning the valley I had been exploring, I decided to slip into the shadows of a floating cloud, using it to cross over a nearby ridge, to hop into another valley. The moment I reached the top of the ridge, I froze for a moment. Not because I had seen something interesting up there, but because at that moment, I felt like I was touching infinity. The relatively small shadow I had been travelling merged with the shadow cast by the ridge and as it stretched so did I. My perception was flooded with information, forcing me to activate Bullet Time, just to try keeping up. But even with the boost, I was still overwhelmed, until I managed to snap back to reality and pulled my construct back together.

The sensation left me breathless, both from the sudden exertion and the sheer potential it had. The sudden increase of the shadow I had been moving in had brought me a stark reminder that I had been intellectually aware of, but had never quite internalised. The Shadows were one, and they were infinite.

Could I, in that brief moment, have snapped not to the position I had started out at, but to another point in my perception? If it was my magical construct, which was essentially only a magically held together ball of shadows that contained my mind, it should be possible. And if that was possible, what about the shadow-step? So far, neither Rai nor I had experimented with it beyond our immediate line of sight, moving from one shadow to another we could easily see, but was that truly the limit? Or could we, if we managed to conceptualise it, step from one shadow to any other shadow, no matter the distance? If so, the ability was, in gaming terms, completely broken, unless there was a price to be paid, possibly by an exponential increase in Astral Power-cost that made any stepping beyond a certain distance prohibitively expensive.

Smiling to myself, I decided to experiment a little and kept one part of my focus on a pretty rock that I had spotted on the ridge while letting my perception stretch through the shadow down the mountain. For the first few moments, it worked but the increased area quickly flooded my mind again, but this time, I had another idea. Instead of trying to reduce the amount of information I was getting by reducing the area I was perceiving, I reduced the amount of information by limiting the method, so to speak. Before, I had focused on using an equivalent of sight to process information, essentially giving me eyes within the shadow that looked out. Now, I was giving up on that, my mind was simply not made to process more visual information than what I got from my two eyes. Increased attributes could help, but not far enough.

On the other hand, my brain was perfectly capable of processing information from countless skin-cells and the nerves therein and it was just as capable when the amount of skin increased. After all, as a toddler you had a fraction of the skin-surface you had as an adult, yet you only had two eyes in both stages. To me, that meant tactile perception was the one that scaled the easiest.

The result of mentally closing my eyes was thoroughly weird. Weird, but not unpleasant. It was as if I was slowly caressing the mountainside, letting tendrils of shadow brush past rocks, into crevices and down the slopes. Strangely beautiful, at least until I realised that I was, once again, using up Astral Power at a prodigious rate. But it hadn’t been for nothing, one of the crevisses I had crept into was far more than the narrow crag could possibly hint at.